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lloyd christmas

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Posts posted by lloyd christmas

  1. There's nothing like having the whole (stateside) base wearing reflective belts 24/7 so we can "reflect" on alcohol awareness after our most recent DUI. Somebody craps their pants and now we all have to wear diapers.

    Is that why every active duty person here at Little Rock is wearing reflective belts?

  2. I am a member of an AETC unit so I have no deployment requirements. With that said, I am working this process right now for the 5th time. I have found it best to get permission from the boss to contact other units to see if they need help. If you are in Guard unit you can find out which units are in the AEF bucket for the time you want to be gone through your logistics plans office. Call the units directly once you have that info. They will use your help, just remember that there are alot of folks making the same phone calls right now because there are no man days out there other than deployments.

    • Upvote 1
  3. I have to put a positive story out there. Our Wing Commander is the complete opposite. He is easily one of the best aircraft commanders I have ever flown with. Rank doesn't mean much to him on the airplane. He just wants to fly. As a matter of fact, I can't count the times I have been on a weekend trip with him hauling trash somewhere. He is a guy who is approaching the 10K hour mark in military aircraft. He is old school and very respected. They are out there but I realize they are not the norm anymore.

  4. Lloyd, just to clarify, there are days available for Guard/Reserve members at non-associated tanker units to go TDY to the AOR?

    Cant speak directly for tanker guys. Our 130 unit says there are days for rotations to the AOR. I would ask you Log Plans office for clarification.

  5. Bottom line is that UTAs are used for our drill weekends and FTPs are for currency and local flight training. If big daddy AF wants the Guard and Reserves help he is going to have to pay for it with man days. The AF apparently thinks they can do it all on their own for now. What sucks is my section alone basically laid off 6 or 7 bums. These guys had actually been working and not scamming the system. They are instructors who were training students in an active duty FTU squadron as well as our squadron.

  6. Does anyone know what the deal is with the Guard/Reserve man days? I read an article today about the tanker units in the northeast having to cancel their support of the tanker bridge over the Atlantic because they do not have man days. Our unit (AETC) has been told there are absolutely no MPA days available in the foreseeable future. This affects our part time guys who are wanting to bum with us or go fly with our active duty counterparts here in the C-130 FTU at Little Rock. It seems to be an issue across the board.

  7. This is what is wrong with the AF. The AF has been trying to make everyone feel like some kind of warrior for a long time now. We have the creed and now another stupid motto. They are trying to make everyone even. Everyone is a warrior. This is a large part of why the shoe clerk feels like he has power. So which of the Fly, Fight or Win part of the slogan does the shoe clerk fit into?

    I don't know about you, but I take warriors to work. That is what we do in the Herc. I am no warrior. Last time I checked I am not kicking in doors in some village in Afghanistan. To me, those are the warriors.

    • Upvote 1
  8. Reminds me of my Joint Forge rotation to Ramstein 2005. The maintainers had to tie the chock ropes in bowties, make the cord to the power cart come off the airplane at a 90 degree angle and put the number three prop blade EXACTLY straight down. The maintainers would get woke up if Doc saw any infractions on his early morning jog down the flight line. We were also forbidden to mix the green and blue Opel vans in the parking lots. If there were different sizes of vans we had to taller tap them when parking. Combat Proud baby! How do people like this get promoted?

  9. Just curious if this is the same guy that crashed as a Thunderbird at Mt Home?

    CSAF Individual Safety Award - Lt. Col. Christopher Stricklin, 14th Flying Training Wing, Columbus Air Force Base, Miss.

    Colonel Stricklin led and managed flight, ground, and weapon safety programs for 3,000 personnel, including 20 essential safety personnel who provided over 3,120 annual hours of on-call service. As a direct result of his efforts, flight mishaps were reduced in nearly every category; down 50 percent in Class A, 70 percent in Class C, 44 percent in Class E, and 50 percent in Controlled Movement Area Violations.

    Article here. http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123194075

  10. As we are not a flying squadron we can not assume the lineage of a flying squadron as it one day may be reactivated and reassume a flying mission.

    Square

    That is not true. Take a gander at the 76th Fighter Squadron at Moody AFB as an example. That squadron has one of the most rich histories of any flying unit. Part of the famous "Flying Tigers" in WWII. It was also an A-10 unit at England AFB for years and years. It became the 76th Space Operations Squadron until recently, when it was activated again at Moody AFB. They fly the A-10 once again.

    I trust and respect the views of the folks at Maxwell. I think they may be wrong this time though.

  11. Well, organization-wise all the FACS belonged to the 504th Tac Air Support Gp which was located near Saigon (Bien Hoa AB or Tan Son Hut AB...I can't remember which). The group had four squadrons, three in country (19th 20th and 21st TASS) and one at Nakhon Phanom (NKP), Thailand (22nd TASS). The NKP guys only did out-country work on the "trail" and were not assigned as FACs to an army unit for CAS work (I'm not saying they might not have occasionally done some for other people, but they weren't assigned to a standard ground unit). Each of the in-country squadrons then had a detachment at their assigned ground units. I was a 20th TASS guy, with the squadron at Danang. The 20th TASS had OV-10s at Chu Lai AB, the HQ for the Americal Division (my unit). There were more OV-10s up at either Hue Phu Bai or Quang Tri airfield outside Hue, north of Danang, to support the 1st Cav. The 20th also had O-2s at several other locations (Danang, Tam Ky, and up at Hue somewhere) to support the ARVN and US Special Forces units. That way, each Army Division had a FAC unit co-located at or near its HQ, and an ALO permanently assigned to the Division, who also served as the location commander for all the unit's FACs. I was at Chu Lai, assigned to support the northern most Americal Bde...the 196th Inf Bde (Light). Chu Lai was the dividing line between the center and northern Bdes so we could support both from the same location, but the third Americal Bde (198th Inf Bde) was farther south at Quang Ngai, so we kept two or three OV-10s down there for quicker response.

    First, you have to remember that this was the 60s and early seventies. It was largely a daytime war on our part, so we didn't worry too much about night time support for our grunts...the basic companies in the field pretty much hunkered down in the evening and didn't engage much. The OV-10 could fly about 3.5 hours on a mission when loaded for in-country CAS. That was four LAU-79 pods with seven 2.75" rockets each (two white phosphorus (willie pete) pods and two HE pods) and four M-60 (7.62mm) machine guns in the chin pods. We would plan to take off at first light, and fly four sorties during the day, which generally put one airplane in the air over each Bde's AO at all times. Sometimes we staggered a little to avoid becoming predictable. If you had an area of visible activity every morning, we'd occasionally take off an hour early and try to catch the bad guys before they hid for the day (or take off late to save gas, depart on schedule, then suddenly return late in the evening and try to catch them)...and it sometimes worked!

    As for CAS, it was a mixed bag. There were two basic kinds of support...Pre-plans (PP) and TIC support. For PPs, every day the Army woud review its intel and submit requests to 7th AF (thru each Corps "Direct Air Support Center" - DASC) for pre-planned strikes. Those were usually either hits on places the Army thought were bad guy locations, and LZ preps..strikes in advance of an attack or insertion. The former were notoriously bad ...the intel was frequently a report that "Six VC were seen at grid coords xxxxxxxx", or "A source says there are a dozen VC camped at grid coord xxxxxxx". Of course, by the time the sortie was actually fragged, it was two days later and even if the report was accurate (a rarity, in my opinion) they were long gone by then. But, the process allowed 7th AF to equitibly divide up the daily frag to give every unit a fair share of the action each day, and both the DASC and the FAC had the authority to move the strike if the Army changed plans or the six guys didn't cooperate and stay at their former location waving red flags or if there was a more important need somewhere else (TIC being one of those).

    So, each day I would get up and report to the det's ops center about an hour prior to take off. I'd brief with our Ops Officer and then go to the division's Tactical Operations Center (TOC) to get a tactical update from the duty officer. I'd note the latest recorded position of all US and foreign (usually only ARVN) units in the field (I say "recorded" because they were frequently moving and there was no real time reporting in those days) and get a list of all the fragged activity (my PPs during my time on-station). I'd then get a ride down to the aircraft, pre-flight, and launch. It was all pretty casual...as a FAC, we ran our own war and there wasn't too much on-scene supervision in a "single seat" airplane (the OV had two seats, of course, but we flew alone except for an occasional demo ride for a visitor). Given that we flew in the same geographic area supporting the same guys against the same enemy about five days a week, the process didn't need a lot of formality...we knew our business and we knew what everybody else was doing, too. We always had a few "hip pocket targets" we knew needed some attention, even if the tasking chain didn't. Besides, if we had air and didn't use them, they'd be out of gas in ten minutes and dump their load in the ocean anyway. In my case, the AO bordered the Marines to the north (the "Hostage" FACs flying marine OVs) and we'd frequently talk to them to exchange information about the activity on our respective sides of the line, particularly valuable because the enemy wandered back and forth a lot and getting the Marine Regiment and the Army Bde to formally exchange info was an exercise in futility. The FACs spoke the same language, however, so that worked well. Generally, I'd fly into the AO...about a 10-15 minute flight from Chu Lai...and do a quick recce of known positions or reported activity. If I had PP scheduled I'd talk to our radio operator at the Bde CP and get an update on what was going on to determine if I needed to move the PP to another location. If so, I'd have him notify the DASC (it was supposed to be a "request", but I generally didn't phrase it that way. He may have...) and I'd go put in the strike at whereever I determined was the most useful location. Most of my air was AF F-4s from Danang or F-100s from Tuy Hua, and Marine F-4s, A-4s and A-6s from Chu Lai and Danang.

    On the other hand, if a TIC erupted, the rules changed a little. If I had a PP already inbound, I'd divert it. Then I'd call for assets (via the radio operator at the CP) and the I Corps DASC ("I DASC") would first try to divert airborne assets for my use, or last, they'd launch alert aircraft if nothing was readily available. This was when it got a little interesting, because you might have a TIC with close contact and I DASC would send you four F-4s with 2000lb slicks (mk84s) previously enroute to hit the trail. As you might imagine, a mk 84 slick is not the most effective CAS weapon in the inventory, but it was the closest. When this happened you had to improvise. I might look at the ground and try to estimate where the bad guy's leadership might be supervising from...the crest of a nearby hill or a thick stand of trees a few hundred meters away...and dump the mk 84s there. If it didn't do anything else, it got their heads down and their ears bleeding. By the time that was over, maybe (usually) someone better suited would show up. We had A-1s at Danang and if we had a TIC we frequently got some of those. They were great, particularly because they were always loaded for anti-personnel missions (supporting SAR) and they had a couple of everything in the inventory onboard...20mm, 7.62, nape, mk81 (250lb) high drags, CBU, 2.75' rockets, and the ever-reliable .38 cal pistol the pilot would shoot out of the cockpit in a final act of defiance when he ran out of everything else (which took a while with A-1s!!). Not only that, but their slow speed made them incredibly accurate compared to a jet.

    In the course of a week, we usually flew four or five days, spent one day as the temporary ALO at the 196th HQ, and had one day off. When we were at the Bde, I'd check in with the Bde S-2 (Intel) and S-3 (Operations) and then hop a chopper ride out to a firebase to talk with they guys in the field. They frequently knew a lot of little details that didn't make it up to the Division or Brigade level and we'd work out "deals"...sort of like trick plays we'd work on the bad guys. We knew they monitored our radios, so we worked out little codes for special things. For instance there was a little hill that one guy swore had a one or two man observation post on it, but it was hard to predict when the guy was out of his hole. We had a code that we set up that alerted me when the Platoon leader thought the observer was up. I then called in and said I was out of fuel and ammo and was going home. I then casually headed in the direction of Chu Lai until I flew over the hill, then dumped the nose and fired everything I had at the top of the hill. I never saw anything, but the platoon leader later said he never saw movement again, so we either got him or scared him off, I guess.

    Finally, yes, we did go trolling for contact occasionally. It wasn't necessary most of the time, but if things were really quiet and boring, you could go out to a few of the places you knew were heavily visited by bad guys, and fiddle with the pitch to get the props a little out of sync. The resulting sound really grated on your nerves, so the bad guys would sometimes get pissed and fire a few shot at you. They weren't much of a threat, but now you had a valid "FAC under fire" situation and that was always good for a few flights of fighters from I DASC. They were mostly fighter guys, so they imagined 37mm or 57mm AAA blasting away at you. In our case it was usually a pissed off VC with a rifle or AK-47, but I didn't have to tell DASC about that. I had fun, the fighter guys who were also bored had fun, and the VC that survived had their fields plowed up for the spring planting. Everybody wins (well, almost everybody...not the guy with the AK and a few of his close friends, unless they ran fast for a ways before the fighters got there).

    All this fun and games was ruined by a bunch of eggheads in the research labs who came up with SPAAGs and MANPADs. Mobile 23mm stuff ("ZPU-23-4" in my day) and SA-7s changed the rules a lot. No more slowly hanging around at 1500' watching for the bad guys. What a shame. It was really a great mission!

    Incredible stories. Keep them up and thank you for your service. :beer:

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